Jack Cade has spent the past seven months avenging his dead ex-girlfriend - organizing riots, hunting slavers, even committing the worst of all Oxford crimes: setting fire to the Bodleian Library.
Now he's discovered that the woman whose death drove...
When Myrrha left Oxford, with her sister's curse nipping at her heels like a small, annoying dog, she went to the place she thought of as her laboratory: a cottage in the village of Eynsham, where the ferns clustered thickly enough to ensure her privacy.
She had used it to study couples in isolation, locking them in and recording how long it took them to claw each other's eyes out – in one case, literally. She supposed she was going there now to study herself. If she had to suffer the indignity of falling in love, she could at least observe the experience.
She could feel it eating away at her, that compulsion for something she couldn't touch or hear or see. Something that wasn't even in the world yet. Perhaps this was what it was like to bear a child. The serene, unfocused love, the knowledge that a creature you had never seen – of whose character you knew nothing – was going to be the sole concern of the rest of your life.
But the man on whom her whole life hinged was less than a foetus – he wouldn't be a foetus for nearly two hundred and seventy years. It wasn't long before it occurred to Myrrha how uncertain it was that she would ever meet him. This incarnation of Eve's had already lasted a long time. She would be cut down soon, just like she always was, and the light would go out on the demon race. They would be plunged into sleep again.
Would he find her? Would he wake her? Would she be like Sleeping Beauty, awoken with a kiss?
Of course not. He was a mortal – and, worse still, a man. He wouldn't know her. His eyes would be forever wandering. So she had to be forever wandering. How did you capture a restless object? By being constantly in motion yourself.
She needed to find a way to cut herself off from Eve, to stay awake when the others slumbered. And she needed to act quickly. Eve could die at any moment, and Robin Crake would only live once. If she missed him...
That was when Myrrha realized she'd been planning this for centuries. Every book she'd read, every experiment she'd performed, every incantation she'd memorized – it had all been directed to this end. Ever since she had realized that her sister had made her a goddess in form and mind, but not in power, ever since she had realized that she'd been created to help somebody else make sense of the world, she had been planning her rebellion, without even knowing it.
She had always been drawn to magic, and she had thought this was just because it offered her a shadow of her sister's power – a slim and labour-intensive shadow, but a shadow nonetheless. Now she realized she could use it to take her sister's power, if only she could understand the nature of that power. If she could understand how Eve came about – what it was that kept summoning her to life again and again – she was sure she could devise a way to kill her permanently.
Well, the pompous Faustus could be useful there. He had been present when she was awoken, though she refused to believe such an idiot had been responsible for waking her. And all he valued was knowledge, so he would be easy enough to bribe.
But the most urgent thing was cutting herself off from Eve. Even now, thinking these thoughts, she was vulnerable. She couldn't keep secrets from her sister until she was separate – a being in her own right.
The ritual she devised to cut herself off from Eve involved removing one of her own ribs – in reference to that rib of Adam's that had caused so much trouble in the book of Genesis.
Perhaps it hadn't needed to be so painful, but Myrrha was feeling spitefully melodramatic by this point – boiling over with rage and longing and nervous despair. She wanted something external to match her internal state. She wanted a bloody mess.
She was conscious the whole time. And in a sullen, quiet moment, when she lay on the floor next to the little bone she had just removed, curved like a beckoning finger, she speculated about what her Robin would look like, and drew faces in the puddle of blood that surrounded her.
In a way, it was a lot like suicide, for what is suicide but striking out on your own, cutting yourself out of the complex web of interdependencies that make up the world? And just like beads on a necklace, when Myrrha broke the chain, many other creatures fell out before the link could repair itself. The flora and fauna of hell – the dragons and tame fire and light-bearing roots – became unattached, roamed and flourished in the deserted tunnels when Eve and the other demons resumed their long, deep sleep.
This was when the male gargoyles fell out of the chain too, though they had been, perhaps, a little more willing to fall, a little less likely to cling on, because they were second-class citizens in their own, matriarchal world, and so had very little to lose. But they were never as completely removed as Myrrha. Because Myrrha had willed it – because she had picked out the bone herself, and, later, picked it clean – she kept her wits when Eve slept. She was always Myrrha. It was a blessing and a curse.
On the floor of her cottage, surrounded by blood and one, beckoning bone, Myrrha passed out for a while – two or three hours, maybe, because the moon was out by the time she stirred again, frosting the blood silver.
Two foxes had got in through the broken window-pane, and were lapping at her fingertips. Attracted by the blood, she supposed. Perhaps they thought she was carrion. Perhaps she was.
The tender touch caused a sort of prickling in the vicinity of her eyes, but she didn't cry. She never cried from that moment on. Besides, she knew how quickly the lapping could turn to gnawing. She even vaguely respected that sudden veering from tenderness to savagery. She felt as though they were creatures after her own heart.
She got up, did her best to staunch the bleeding, and fed the foxes on salted beef from the scullery. She knew better, of course, than to leave one of her bones lying around – especially such a symbolic one – so she boiled it clean, dried it out, and ground it up into a fine powder, which she kept in a little bottle round her neck. She even fancied she could see a glow coming from it, as though it had drunk up some of the moonlight on that first night of its release.
She knew immediately that the ritual had worked. She felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life. Her thoughts all but echoed in her head, like a little girl lost in a cave. But in a way, this was exhilarating. For the first time in her life, her mind was her own – tantalizingly empty – and she could fill it with any furnishings she pleased.
She didn't guess how exhausting this would prove. She didn't know that, when you're unremittingly yourself, unremittingly awake – for she never slept from that moment either – you have to go to ridiculous lengths to keep the boredom at bay. Her love of games, her desperate pursuit of some kind of random outcome, would spring from this.
She was so clever – she knew so much – she could see into the future – and god, it was boring, boring, boring! What she would give for something unexpected to happen – for somebody, just once, to surprise her.
In fact, it happened not once, but twice. And, both times, the one who surprised her was Faustus's dull, timid, tiresome housemaid.
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